March 23, 1995
Dear Noam,
Your resort to sarcasm demonstrates not only the poverty of your arguments but a very large measure of mauvaise foi. Perhaps I should thank you for liberating me from the obviously exaggerated esteem in which I once held you, but you do not deserve to be thanked and the transition from profound disappointment to "liberation" has been neither easy nor pleasant, so I'll skip it.
You show how willing, eager in fact, you are to slug it out with all the dirty tricks of a street thug (or our friends from Langley) when it is clear that your opponent is winning the argument. I noticed this before, when I saw how you insisted on simply repeating your own arguments rather than responding to mine, and how easily you resorted to name-calling in lieu of argumentation. I'm referring to your description of Prouty as a "raving fascist" and a "fraud." When I asked you to explain why you think so, besides the claim that he is "associated" with Liberty Lobby, you did not respond. And this from a guy who himself has been denounced as an "anti-Semite" because he defended Faurisson's right to speak!
I did not say or imply that the pessimistic reports you mention on pp. 81-83 of Rethinking Camelot came after Nov. 22, and you know it. I said that YOU SAY (on pp. 91-93) that the consensus changed radically immediately after Nov. 22. This is merely a ridiculous and totally transparent attempt on your part to avoid my question.
You protest far too much. If you were half as intelligent as I once thought you were, you would long ago have accepted the fact (especially since you make it clear yourself on pp. 91-93, and as the Gravel Pentagon Papers also make clear) that the military assessment was reversed immediately after JFK's murder. You would also have admitted that you consider this a coincidence unless it can be proved otherwise (which makes your position, as I have told you, essentially identical to Schlesinger's). I'm sure you could have trotted out a long list of similar coincidences, and any freshman composition student is aware of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.
But no. Out of arrogance or just plain stupidity, you refuse to admit that the military assessment was reversed after Nov. 22–plainly contradicting yourself as well as the documentary record. You also continue to ignore my point, which I have made abundantly clear, by treating it as if it were the same as John Newman's, which it quite obviously is not.
The only people who are arguing about JFK's "secret intentions to withdraw without victory" are you and Newman. I am talking about JFK's documented and public intention to withdraw on the assumption (not condition) of continued military success. This assumption was reversed, AFTER Nov. 22, and subsequently the withdrawal policy was also reversed. I cannot believe that you are too stupid to understand the difference between this and Newman's much more speculative thesis, so I can only ascribe your stubbornness here to arrogance: How can a mere Michael Morrissey be right, and Noam Chomsky be wrong?
I don't think you are an agent. It has crossed my mind, but I don't think you would have written to me if you were. You would have been more likely to ignore me, as John Newman has done. I think you are a man who has been told far too many times how brilliant he is, an American who cannot rid himself of the illusion that the United States is still "the freest country in the world" (as you said in the film Manufacturing Consent–and you should have heard the German audience groan at that), and the best example of a propagandized intellectual that I can think of. I'm sure that your IQ by the Bell Curve's standard is impressively high, but you are still an American, and the idea that a coup d'état could take place in America, especially without perspicacious commentators such as your friend Alexander Cockburn and geniuses such as yourself even being aware of it, is simply beyond your capacity. The idea is too big for you. You cannot take the shock, confusion, and fear that this idea brings with it when you let it into your brain, especially the shock of recognizing that you are as subject to mind control as anyone else, and that you are a slave just like the rest of us.
And yes, I believe I am beyond you in this respect, because I KNOW that I can be wrong, can be deluded to a point that I would never have dreamed possible, especially because I always thought of myself as fairly well-informed, skeptical, independent, etc. I don't think you have ever had such an experience. You think you can see through the self-delusion and propagandization of others, and perhaps you do, but you have not seen through yourself. The idea that you can be (and are) a victim has not penetrated, and IQ doesn't help at all here.
My best defense against your snide suggestion that I am an agent is my quarrel with you. I believe the CIA killed JFK and have said so publicly, and about half of the American population have similar suspicions, according to a Time/CNN poll taken before the Stone film came out (Time, Jan. 13, 1992, European ed., p. 40). Your foolish insistence that there is no evidence of high-level conspiracy, and your even more foolish and (now) blatantly self-contradictory "position" on the withdrawal question, support the established lies on both issues and thus help to exonerate the CIA, the government as a whole, and the complicit media Establishment. Which of the two of us looks more like an agent? Your long association with MIT, despite the incongruity of the nation's most prominent "radical leftist dissident" being so tight with the nation's No. 1 educational institution with military and intelligence ties, is also suspicious.
But I do not stoop as easily as you do to mud-slinging, and I will not accuse you of being an agent, even though your actions aid the enemy much more than mine. Nor did I accuse Newman of being an agent. I referred to his well-known intelligence background and asked him a few perfectly legitimate and justifiable questions. If he were honest, he would have nothing to fear by answering them, and everything to gain–namely, credibility. But his silence is also an answer, and it speaks even worse for him than your sarcasm does for you.
Sincerely,
Michael
I did not have the last word. In his curt reply (and last letter to me) on 4/3/95, Chomsky referred me to Rethinking Camelot concerning his "alleged refusal" to answer my question about Prouty (though in the book he says only that Prouty's evidence is "anecdotal"). "The remainder," he said, "is at the same level of respect for fact, making it clear that there is no point proceeding. That's it, for me."
That was it for me, too.
Although I told Chomsky in 1995 that I did not think he was an agent, in retrospect, writing now in 2007 and having witnessed his continuing ostrich-like refusal to acknowledge any evidence for "conspiracy" regarding the events of 9/11–except for the government's own implausible conspiracy theory, which the majority of the population now reject–I am much less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.